Pentagon Papers

Scope Note: U.S. National Archives website, 4 January 2017: ǂb Pentagon Papers entry (The Pentagon Papers, officially titled "Report of the Office of the Secretary of Defense Vietnam Task Force", was commissioned by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara in 1967. In June of 1971, small portions of the report were leaked to the press and widely distributed. However, the publications of the report that resulted from these leaks were incomplete and suffered from many quality issues. On the 40th anniversary of the leak to the press, the National Archives, along with the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon Presidential Libraries, has released the complete report. There are 48 boxes and approximately 7,000 declassified pages. Approximately 34% of the report is available for the first time.) ǂu https://www.archives.gov/research/pentagon-papers

Biography.com, 4 January 2017 ǂb Daniel Ellsberg entry (Returning to the RAND Corporation later that year [1967], Ellsberg worked on a top-secret report ordered by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara entitled U.S. Decision-making in Vietnam, 1945-1968. Better known as "The Pentagon Papers," the final product was a 7,000-page, 47-volume study that Ellsberg called "evidence of a quarter century of aggression, broken treaties, deceptions, stolen elections, lies and murder." In late 1969, with the help of former RAND colleague Anthony Russo, Ellsberg began secretly photocopying the entire Pentagon Papers. He privately offered the Papers to several congressmen including the influential J. William Fulbright, but none was willing to make them public or hold hearings about them. So in March 1971 Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times, which began publishing them three months later.) ǂu http://www.biography.com/people/daniel-ellsberg-17176398#government-service-and-pentagon-papers

New Yorker, December 19 & 26, 2016, A critic at large: ǂb page 119 ("Daniel Ellsberg, Edward Snowden, and the Modern Whistle-Blower"; In the summer of 1967, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara commissioned a group of thirty-six scholars to write a secret history of the Vietnam War. The project took a year and a half, ran to seven thousand pages, and filled forty-seven volumes. Only a handful of copies were made, and most were kept under lock and key in and around the Beltway. One set, however, ended up at the RAND Corporation, in Santa Monica, where it was read, from start to finish, by a young analyst there named Daniel Ellsberg.)

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